Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

MOJOLA 59
global ambitions: we find unique contributions from many other cultures and
nations—Greek, Mongol, Islamic, Chinese, Dutch, Irish….” 5 McGillivray
acknowledges both the positive and the negative aspects of globalisation, the
progressive as well as the destructive.
The first use of the word “global” in this sense has been traced to a Harper’s
Magazine article of 1892 which describes a Monsieur de Vogue, a Frenchman who
“loves travel, he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas, his interests
are as wide as the universe, his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be
‘global’”. 6 Clearly it is not the drive to experience exotic “colours and ideas” a la
Vogue that drove the globalisation process. This may be part of it. It was and is,
however, fuelled by the capitalistic profit motive as well as its inextricably linked
demand for technological innovation and development. The institutionalisation of
science and the knowledge industry is a concomitant part of this process. The
capitalistic profit motive continues to create the material conditions and to justify
the need for the requisite infrastructure of the imperial enterprise and the
globalisation process. It fuels and encourages the movement of peoples, be they
migrants or slaves, hunters for gold or the pursuers of fame, explorers or mere
travellers, the search for luxury goods—spices, sugar, tea, rubber, the creation of
global supply chains, of colonies and empires, of transnational corporations, of the
modern communication revolution that has given rise to the railway and the car, the
jet plane and space-rocket, the traditional telephone and the mobile phone, the
transistor radio and the TV, the calculator and the modern hand-held computer
devices, the maxim gun and the nuclear bomb. The juice that ensures that the
process remains sustainable has been “money, oil and the global casino.” 7
Against the background of the above discussion, it is an irony that the spread
of Christianity—which is nothing short of a miracle—can partly be understood in
terms of the phenomenon of globalisation. Christianity came into being during the
period of the Roman Empire. The entire Mediterranean world was under the
influence of the so-called pax Romana (Roman peace), Roman rule, and Roman
hegemony. The movement of peoples and ideas across the empire undoubtedly
facilitated the movement of ordinary Christians as well as professional Christian
missionaries, such as the ones described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles of
Jesus of Nazareth. The missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul described both in
this book and some of his letters attest to his brilliant use of the infrastructure and
superstructure of the Roman Empire.
5 Ibid., 11.
6 Ibid., 10.
7 Ibid., 186.